IMAGE  EVALUATION 
TEST  TARGET  (MT-3) 


1.0 


1.1 


l^m     125 

lio    ■■" 


2.2 


Hi 


us.    U2.0 


1.8 


1.25  |u     1.6 

^ 

6" 

► 

0% 


^. 


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4 


Photographic 

Sciences 

Corporation 


23  WEST  MAIN  STREET 

WEBSTER,  N.Y.  14S80 

(716)872-4503 


.<^ 


^ 


^ 


CIHM/ICMH 

Microfiche 

Series. 


CIHM/ICMH 
Collection  de 
microfiches. 


Canadian  Institute  for  Historical  Microreproductions  /  Institut  Canadian  de  microreproductions  historiques 


Technical  and  Bibliographic  Notes/Notes  techniques  et  bibliographiques 


The  Institute  has  attempted  to  obtain  the  best 
original  copy  available  for  filming.  Features  of  this 
copy  which  may  be  bibliographically  unique, 
which  may  alter  any  of  the  images  in  the 
reproduction,  or  which  may  significantly  change 
the  usual  method  of  filming,  are  checked  below. 


\3f 


Coloured  covers/ 
Couverture  de  couleur 


□    Covers  damaged/ 
Couverture  endommag^e 

□    Covers  restored  and/or  laminated/ 
Couverture  restaur6e  et/ou  pelliculde 


D 


Cover  title  missing/ 

Le  titre  de  couverture  manque 


I      I    Coloured  maps/ 


0 


D 
D 


D 


D 


Cartes  gdographiques  en  couleur 

Coloured  init  (i.e.  other  than  blue  or  black)/ 
Encre  de  couleur  (i.e.  autre  que  bieue  ou  noire) 


I      I    Coloured  plates  and/or  illustrations/ 


Planches  et/ou  illustrations  en  couleur 

Bound  with  other  material/ 
Relii  avec  d'autres  documents 

Tight  binding  may  cause  shadows  or  distortion 
along  interior  margin/ 

La  reliure  serr^e  peut  causer  de  I'ombre  ou  de  la 
distortion  le  long  de  la  marge  intdrieure 

Blank  leaves  added  during  restoration  may 
appear  within  the  text.  Whenever  possible,  these 
have  been  omitted  from  filming/ 
II  se  peut  que  certaines  pages  blanches  ajoutdes 
lors  d'une  restauration  apparaissent  dans  le  texte, 
mais,  lorsque  cela  6tait  possible,  ces  pages  n'ont 
pas  6ti  film^es. 

Additional  comments:/ 
Commentaires  suppl6mentaires: 


L'lnstitut  a  microfilm^  le  meilleur  exemplaire 
qu'il  lui  a  6t6  possible  de  se  procurer.  Les  details 
de  cet  exemplaire  qui  sont  peut-dtre  uniques  du 
point  de  vue  bibliographique,  qui  peuvent  modifier 
une  image  reproduite,  ou  qui  peuvent  exiger  une 
modification  dans  la  m^thode  normale  de  filmage 
sont  indiquds  ci-dessous. 


□    Coloured  pages/ 
Pages  de  couleur 

□    Pages  damaged/ 
Pages  endommag6es 

I      I    Pages  restored  and/or  laminated/ 


Pages  restaurdes  et/ou  pellicul6es 

Pages  discoloured,  stained  or  foxei 
Pages  d6color6es,  tachetdes  ou  piqu^es 

Pages  detached/ 
Pages  ddtachdes 

Showthrough/ 
Transparence 


I      I    Pages  discoloured,  stained  or  foxed/ 
r~~l»  Pages  detached/ 
r~^   Showthrough/ 


I      I    Quality  of  print  varies/ 


D 
D 
D 


Quality  in^gale  de  {'impression 


Includes  supplementary  material/ 
Comprend  du  materiel  supplementaire 


Only  edition  available/ 
Seule  Edition  disponible 

Pages  wholly  or  partially  obscured  by  errata 
slips,  tissues,  etc.,  have  been  refilmed  to 
ensure  the  best  possible  image/ 
Les  pages  totalement  ou  partiellement 
obscurcies  par  un  feuillet  d'errata,  une  pelure, 
etc.,  ont  6t^  film6es  d  nouveau  de  facon  i 
obtenir  la  meilleure  image  possible. 


This  item  is  fi'med  at  the  reduction  ratio  checked  below/ 

Ce  document  est  film6  au  taux  de  reduction  indiqud  ci-dessous. 

10X  14X  18X  22X 


26X 


SOX 


/ 

12X 


16X 


20X 


a4x 


28X 


32X 


e 

^tails 
s  du 
lodjfier 
r  une 
mage 


The  copy  filmed  here  has  been  reproduced  thanks 
to  the  generosity  of: 

Thomas  Fisher  Rare  Bool(  Library, 
University  of  Toronto  Library 

The  images  appearing  hb.e  are  the  best  quality 
possible  considering  the  condition  and  legibility 
of  the  original  copy  and  in  keeping  with  the 
filming  contract  specifications. 


L'exemplaire  filmi  fut  reproduit  grflce  h  la 
g6n6rosit6  de: 

Thomas  Fisher  Rare  Book  Library, 
University  of  Toronto  Library 

Les  images  suivantes  ont  6t6  reproduites  avec  le 
plus  grand  soin,  compte  tenu  de  la  condition  et 
de  la  nettet6  de  l'exemplaire  filmA,  et  en 
conformit6  avec  les  conditions  du  contrat  de 
filmage. 


Original  copies  in  printed  paper  covers  are  filmed 
beginning  with  the  front  cover  and  ending  on 
the  last  page  with  a  printed  or  illustrated  impres- 
sion, or  the  back  cover  when  appropriate.  All 
other  original  copies  are  filmed  beginning  on  the 
first  page  with  a  printed  or  illustrated  impres- 
sion, and  ending  on  the  last  page  with  a  printed 
or  illustrated  impression. 


Les  exemplaires  originaux  dont  la  couverture  en 
papier  est  imprim^e  sont  filmds  en  commenpant 
par  le  premier  plat  et  en  terminant  soit  par  la 
dernidre  page  qui  comporte  une  empreinte 
d'impression  ou  d'illustration,  soit  par  le  second 
plat,  selon  le  cas.  Tous  les  autres  exemplaires 
originaux  sont  film6s  en  commenpant  par  la 
premiere  page  qui  comporte  une  empreinte 
d'impression  ou  d'illustration  et  en  terminant  par 
la  dernidre  page  qui  comporte  une  telle 
empreinte. 


The  last  recorded  frame  on  each  microfiche 
shall  contain  the  symbol  — ^>  (meaning  "CON- 
TINUED "),  or  the  symbol  V  (meaning  "END"), 
whichever  applies. 


Un  des  symboles  suivants  apparaTtra  sur  la 
dernidre  image  de  cheque  microfiche,  selon  le 
cas:  le  symbole  — ►  signifie  "A  SUIVRE  ",  le 
symbole  V  signifie  "FIN". 


Maps,  plates,  charts,  etc.,  may  be  filmed  at 
different  reduction  ratios.  Those  too  large  to  be 
entirely  included  in  one  exposure  are  filmed 
beginning  in  the  upper  left  hand  corner,  left  to 
right  and  top  to  bottom,  as  many  frames  as 
required.  The  following  diagrams  illustrate  the 
method: 


Les  cartes,  planches,  tableaux,  etc.,  peuvent  Atre 
film6s  d  des  taux  de  reduction  diffirents. 
Lorsque  le  document  est  trop  grand  pour  Atre 
reproduit  en  un  seul  cliche,  il  est  f  ilm6  d  partir 
de  Tangle  sup6rieur  gauche,  de  gauche  d  droite, 
et  de  haut  en  bas,  en  prenant  le  nombre 
d"images  ndcessaire.  Les  diagrammes  suivants 
illustrent  la  m6thode. 


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GRANT  ALLEN 


By 

RICHARD   LE   GALLIENNE 


■ ''    ©fflcc  of  ipublication  : 
Rooms  3118-29-30-31.  Park  Row  Buildinjs' 


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GRANT  ALLEN.* 

L 

Grant  Allen  has  died  at  a  moment  when  we  had  most  need 
of  him,  and  at  the  saddest  time  for  himself.      Not  unpro- 
phetically  did  he  sing: 

.     .     .     our  grave  shall  be  on  the  side 
Of  the  Moabite  mount. 

It  is  sadder  even  than  that,  for  to  die  on  the  threshold  of  their 
promised  land  is  the  fate  of  every  advanced  dreamer  and 
thinker.     Grant  Allen  has  died  at  a  moment  when  the  very 
vision  of  that  promised  land  is  obscured  by  every  form  of 
reactionary  darkness.      He  lived  to  see,  not  indeed  the  fulfil- 
ment of  the  civilized  ideals  for  which  lifelong  he  did  such 
valiant  battle,  but  the  overwhelming  triumph  of  precisely  all 
the  opponent  ideals  which  he  hated  and  dreaded  with  his 
whole  soul,      A  democrat,  he  lived  to  see  democracy  once 
more  in  the  dust,  and  every  form  of  tyranny  and  snobbery 
firmer  than  ever  in  their  seats;  a  clear-seer  and  far-thinker, 
"he  lived  to  see  every  form  of  superstition  re-enthroned,  and 
England  seriously  dreaming  once  more  of  Rome ;  a  citizen-of- 
ttie-world,  he  lived  to  see  race-hatred  revived  with  mediaeval 
fury,  and  narrow  patriotism  once  more  dividing  nations ;  a 
man  of  peace,  he  lived  to  see  civil  freedom  threatened  by  a 
militarism  insolent  and  cruel  as  the  world  has  ever  known. 
Yes,  surely  it  was  a  sad  moment  for  Grant  Allen  to  die.     A 
few  years  before,  the  outlook  had  seemed  so  different,  and  of 
all  those  who  were  then  eagerly  lending  a  hand  to  the  immi- 
nent socialistic,  philosophic,  artistic  millennium,  none  was 
more  effectively  eager,  or  more  boyishly  hopeful,  than  Grant 
Allen.     I  think  it  was  the  indignant  reception  given  to  **  The 

/  *  Originally  printed  in  the  "  Fortnightly  Review." 


( 


/' 


\ 


Grant    Allen. 


Woman  Who  Did  "  which  first  opened  his  eyes  to  the  super- 
ficial nature  of  the  imagined  "  advance  "  of  thought  and 
social  ideals  in  England.      We  hadn't  even  gone  so  far  as  to 
give  patient  hearing  to  an  honest,  pure-purposed,  though  it 
might  be  mistaken,  thinker.      Stones  were  still  regarded  as  the 
appropriate  reward  of  the  prophets — small  stones,  indeed,  as 
Dr.  Stockmann  said  in  **  An  Enemy  of  the  People."      Minor 
stones  for  minor  prophets,  in  a  day  of  small  thir.gs. 

When  I  last  had  any  long  talk  with  Grant  Al'.en,  I  had  come 
somewhat  dolefully  bewailing  what  we  called  "  the  slump  in 
ideas,"  and  I  was  surprised  to  find  how  little  Cf^mfort  he 
could  give  me.      For  once  his  optimism  seemed  '.o  have  failed 
him.      For  that  moment  he  really  seemed  to  hav;  just  "  given 
it  up  "  ;  but  his  despair  characteristically  vanished  in  an  in- 
stant as,  catching  sight  of  a  little  Alpine  flower  which,  to  his 
great  joy,  had  been  persuaded  to  grow  in  his  hill-top  garden, 
he  gathered  a  blossom  and  began  to  discourse  in  his  own  fasci- 
nating way  upon  its  "  honey-guides  "  and  all  the  wonder  of 
its  delicate  mechanism.      Straightway  we  had  both  clean  for- 
gotten the  Dreyfus  case,  absorbed  together  in  a  flower.      In 
cosmos  and  microcosmos,  in  the  wonders  of  what  went  right  in 
natural  law,  Grant  Allen  consoled  himself  for  the  marvels  of 
what  went  wrong  in  human  history.      And  on  this  particular 
occasion  I  know  I  had  caught  him  in  "an  off  moment,  and  the 
malaria  with  which  for  some  months  he  had  been  depressed 
must  be  made  allowance  for  in  that  momentary  daunting  of 
his  spirit  before  the  .gigantic  evils  of  the  civilized  world. 
Had  I  met  him  an  hour  or  two  letter,  I  have  no  doubt  I  should 
have  found  him  once  more  buoyantly  confident  of  better  things. 
He  was  too  long-sighted,  too  tenacious  of  practical  melioris- 
tic  conceptions,  to  mistake  a  temporary  reaction  for  perma- 
nent defeat.     Yet  the  word  "  temporary  "  has  not  the  same 
consolation  for  a  fighter  of  fifty  as  it  has  for  some  young  com- 
batant in  his  twenties,  who  can  afford  to  wait  out  with  a  cer- 
tain complaisance  the  disappointing  ebb  of  the  great  wave  on 
which  he  has  set  his  hopes.     "  Temporary  " — yes!  but  what 
is  the  life  of  man  upon  the  earth?     The  tide  will,  of  course, 
turn.     We  are  only  engaged  in  making  the  inevitable  step 


Grant   Allen. 


backward  before  we  make  two  forward — but,  what  joy  when  we 
make  them  shall  they  be  to  Grant  Allen?     Had  his  life  only 
been  reasonably  prolonged,  as  happily  the  life  of  our  master- 
rebel,  Mr.  George  Meredith,  has  been  prolonged,  he  might 
have  seen  the  sunlit  crest  of  another  mighty  wave  of  freedom. 
Now  he  lies  in  the  dark  trough  between. 

II. 

Recently,  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison,  enumerating  the  chill 
accomplishments  of  the  dead,  gave  more  names  to  knowledge 
than  I  dare  to  remember.      He  was  so  many  '* — ists,"  the 
dead  man  we  loved ;  but  what  would  they  all  have  mattered 
had  he  not  been — Grant  Allen?     The  world  was  always 
meanly  critical  of  him.     The  little  precious  writers  were 
eager  to  say  that  he  was  no  writer,  the  scientists  to  pick  holes 
in  his  science,  the  philosophers  to  smile  at  his  "  Force  and 
Energy."     There  was  nothing  he  set  himself  to  do,  but  some 
small-souled  thing  of  a  critic  would  have  his  little  sneer. 
Through  all,  however,  he  had  the  courage  to  go  on  being — 
Grant  Allen.     Others  might  be  moi  ^  this,  or  greater  that. 
Science  has  its  tiny  grammarians,  its  old-maidish  pedants,  no 
less  than  literature, — men  who  can  no  more  see  a  generaliza- 
tion than  the  eye  of  a  fly  can  take  in  a  mountain.      Such  flies, 
bred  in  the  backyards  of  every  science  or  art,  buzzed  all  his 
life  round  the  head  of  Grant  Allen.      For  the  most  part  he 
was  too  absorbed  in  the  work  he  had  to  do,  to  notice  them; 
and,  when  occasionally  they  did  sting  him — he  just  forgot  it. 

Of  science,  I  know  no  more  than  one  foredoomed  to  the 
practice  of  literature  cannot  escape  knowing  in  an  age  of  sci- 
ence.    Grant  Allen  smiled  when  he  gave  me  long  ago  a  copy 
of  "  Force  and  Energy  " — as  well  he  might.      I  read  it  hard, 
because  he  gave  it  to  me,  and  there  are  one  or  two  additional 
lines  in  my  brow  to  this  day  to  witness  that  I  speak  the 
truth.     All  that  remains  to  me  is  a  somewhat  shaky  idea  of 
two  very  rudimentary  definitions,  the  two  school -boy  defini- 
tions of  energy.      One  I  know  is  potential,  and  the  other  is 
kinetic,  but,  for  the  life  of  me,  I  cannot  say,  at  this  distance 


I ' 


6  Grnpif   Allen. 

of  time,  which  is  which!     I'm  afraid  I  ronsole  myself  with  a 
very  shadowy  respect  for  abstract  thinking.      I  wouldn't  part 
with  my  copy  of  "  Force  and  Energy  "  for  any  inducement; 
but  that,  I  fear,  is  on  account  of  a  simple  human  verse  Grant 
Allen  wrote  in  it  as  he  gave  it  me.      I  knew  he  would  think 
no  less  of  me  because  I  barely  knew  what  the  book  was  about. 
He  was  one  of  those  rare  men  to  whom  one  may  safely  tell  the 
truth,  the  truth  of  one's  ignorance.      Knowing  more  than  most 
men  who  know  much,  knowledge  was  with  him  no  superstition. 
He  could  respect  an  inspired  ignorance  when  he  met  it!     I 
need  not  parade  the  various  forms  of  knowledge  upon  Grant 
Allen's  acquirements,  in  which  I  am  singularly  unqualified  to 
give  an  opinion.      How  speak  of  him  as  a  botanist  when  all  I 
know  of  flowers — out  of  Shakespeare — I  learned  by  looking 
through  that  little  pocket  microscope,  so  well  known  to  his 
friends,  which  he  used  constantly  to  twirl  and  twirl  between 
his  finger  and  thumb  as  he  talked,  and  without  which  I  really 
think  he  could  not  have  talked  at  all.      1  have  seen  him 
stop  in  the  middle  of  a  sentence  as  he  momentarily  lost  hold  of 
it,  and  then  once  more  go  on  flowingly  as  he  had  it  twirling 
again — like  the  boy  in  Scott's  class  at  school,  whose  memory 
seemed  to  be  located  in  a  certain  button  of  his  waistcoat,  which 
he  gripped  confidently  as  his  turn  to  answer  questions  came 
round.     Scott,  noting  this,  cut  off  the  button;  and,  thus  robbed 
of  his  mnemonic  stay,  the  hapless  leader  of  his  class  toppled 
and  fell.      Scott  took  his  place,  a  place  never  regained;  and 
his  life-long  remorse  at  the  incident  is  well  known  to  readers 
of  the  autobiography.      No  one  was  ever  cruel  enough  to  lob 
Grant  Allen  of  his  mnemonic  microscope,  though  I  confess  that 
my  fingers  often  came  near  to  it.     Now,  I  wonder  if  his  mem- 
ory lived  in  that  little  optical  toy,  as  the  soul  of  the  great 
chief  in  "  The  Great  Taboo  "  lived  in  the  mistletoe  branch  of 
the  sacred  tree.     Will  it  pass  to  the  next  inheritor  of  the  sad 
little  microscope?     If  so,  what  an  inheritance!     For  one  of 
the  many  remarkable  things  about  Grant  Allen  was  the  pro- 
digious range  and  accuracy  and  instantaneous  readiness  of  his 
memory.     This  was  so  proverbial  amongst  his  friends  that  one 
of  the  dearest  of  them  coined  the  phrase,  "  We  must  look  it  up 


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in  Grant.*'  and  in  his  whimsical  way  he  once  discussed  the 
scheme  of  abandoning  literature  and  setting  up  as  a  peripa- 
tetic encyclopedia,  a  modern  Camerarius,  a  sort  of  general 
call-office  of  knowledge. 

But  it  was  not  so  much  the  extent  of  his  knowledge  as  his 
manner  of  imparting  it.  which  was  one  of  the  many  personal 
gifts  of  a  liberally-gifted  personality.      Dull  slaves  of  knowl- 
edge, pedants  whose  one  gift,  after  industry,  is  the  power  of 
making  interesting  things  dull,  naturally  try  to  cheapen  the 
power  of  making  dull  things  interesting.      They  call  it  "  pop- 
ularizing."     Whenever  a  man  with  the  gift  of  vivid,  illustra- 
tive expression  gets  hold  of  some  subject  hitherto  monopolized 
by  specialists  hooting  to  each  other  in  dark  technicalities,  and 
makes  it  clear  and  operative  for  the  average  intelligent  hu- 
man being,  the  process  is  belittled  as  "  popularizing." 
When  any  one  has  written  history  in  a  readable  form, — as  say 
Macaulay,  Froude,  and  Green, — they  are  said  to  "  popular- 
ize "  history.      They  are  not  dull  enough  to  be  trustworthy. 
Of  course,  the  cry  has  been  raised  from  the  remotest  time. 
Dante  heard  it  in  his  day,  wheri  he  dared  to  mould  to  a  liter- 
ary use  a  vernacular  tongue.     The  first  men  who  wrote  serious 
scientific  and  philosophic  treatises  in  any  language  but  Latin 
— they  heard  it.     The  men  who  turned  the  Bible  into  English 
and  German — didn't  they  hear  it?       O  this  dreadful  "  popu- 
larization "  of  hidden  knowledge,  which  only  the  bats  and 
owls  of  university  libraries  were  born  to! 

To  some  such  chorus  Grant  Allen  "  popularized  "  science. 
He  made  it  clear,  he  made  it  simple,  he  made  it  interesting, 
he  made  it  positively  romantic;  for  he  was  more  even  than  an 
apt  exponent,  he  was  no  little  of  a  poet,  and  those  who  see 
nothing  in  such  books  as  his  "  Evolutionist  at  Large,"  "  Colin 
Clout's  Calendar,"  "  Vignettes  from  Nature,"  "  Moorland 
Idylls,"  but  clear  statement  and  luminous  exposition,  do  scant 
justice  to  a  rare  literary  gift  exercising  icself  not  merely  with 
expository  skill,  but  also  artistically,  upon  difficult  new  ma- 
terial.    More  than  clearness  of  statement  was  needed.     Some 
of  the  dullest  of  writers  are  as  clear  as  they  are  dry.     Grant 
Allen's  individual  clearness  came  of  imagination,  as  his 


7 


8 


Grant   Allen. 


charm  came  of  an  illustrative  fancy,  and  a  gay  humanity  ap- 
plied to  subjects  usually  immured  from  traffic  with  such  friv- 
olous qualities.      Thus  he  not  only  made  knowledge  delightful 
to  know,  but  delightful  to  read.      In  short,  he  gave  us  some- 
thing like  literary  equivalents  of  his  subjects.      His  essays 
were  not  always  flowers  and  butterflies,  but  they  often  were, 
and  certainly  they  were  such  flowers  and  butterflies  as  glad- 
den but  seldom  the  volcanic  rocks  of  science. 

Mere  clearness  of  statement — I  said  just  now.     I  beg  to 
withdraw  the- suspicion  of  depreciation  in  the  phrase;  for  the 
aesthetic  charm  of  a  really  masterly  clearness  of  statement  is 
one  which  qualifies  for  high  literary  honors.      There  was  a 
time  in  all  our  lives  when 'we  used  to  say  that  Pope  was  no 
poet — because,  I  suppose,  he  is  not  all  sensual  adjectives.     A 
friend  who  had  realized  before  me  the  poetry  of  thought 
clearly  and  rhythmically  expressed  long  ago  cured  me  of  that. 
So  latterly  with  prose,  the  beautiful  triumphs  of  the  musical, 
decorative  school — De  Quincey,  Pater,  Stevenson — have  made 
us  think  of  prose  too  much  as  though  it  were  merely  a  Morris 
wall-paper.     Let  it  be  a  Morris  wall-paper  by  all  means,  but 
let  it  remain  everything  else  it  can  efficiently  be  as  well. 
Bacon's  "  Essays  "  entirely  depend  for  their  en^iurance  on 
their  clearness  of  statement. 

Now,  judged  merely  by  a  literary  standard,  valued  merely  as 
expression  which  is  capable  of  taking  hold  of  a  complex,  debat- 
able subject,  and  treating  it  clearly,  completely,  and  charm- 
ingly, though  from  an  unfamiliar,  even  startling,  standpoint, 
I  would  venture  to  make  a  high  claim  for  some  papers  which 
Grant  Allen  probably  thought  comparatively  little  of,  and  any 
one  of  which  he  most  likely  dashed  off  on  his  supernatural 
typewriter  under  the  hour.      I  mean  those  explosive  nutshells 
of  what  one  might  call  prophetic  thinking,  first  contributed  to 
the  ' '  Westminster  Gazette  ' '  and  since  collected  into  a  volume 
under  the  title  of  "  Post-Prandial  Philosophy."     If  any  mod- 
ern English  writer  has  matched  these  little  "  journalistic  " 
essays  in  swift  thinking  and  swift  statement,  has  packed  so 
much  mind  in  so  small  a  capsule  of  printed  matter,  and  has, 
at  the  same  time,  contrived  to  give  so  personal  an  accent  of 


-(S 


ul 


A 

It. 

de 
s 


as 
al- 


ly 


o 

le 

i- 


Grant   Allen.  9 

charm — or  power  of  producing  furious  irritation  (the  result  of 
charm  applied  to  the  wrong  reader) — to  his  spare,  hard- 
worked,  under-manned,  two  thousand  words — I  think  it  can 
only  be  Grant  Allen  under  still  another  of  those  pseudonyms 
in  which  he  felt  it  only  decent  to  drape  the  fruitfulness  of  his 
abounding  muse. 

Grant  Allen  was  one  of  those  instructive  writers  who  write 
best  when  they  think  least  about  it, — when,  so  to  speak,  they 
forget  they  are  writing.      It  was  not  natural  to  him  to  work 
self-consciously,  like  prose  writers  such  as  Pater  and  Steven- 
son.    He  wrote  best  when  he  wrote  as  he  talked,  fired  with  in- 
terest for  the  thing  he  had  to  express,  and  concerned  only  to 
state  it  as  clearly  and  adequately  as  possible.      Curiously 
enough,  in  the  modesty  of  his  mind  it  never  seemed  to  occur 
to  him  that  this  was  his  native  way  of  being  an  artist  in 
words.     Such  things  as  the  "  Post-Prandial  Philosophy  "  he 
regarded  as  all  in  the  day's  work,  and  prided  himself  rather 
on  these  occasional  experiments  in  the  more  conscious  and 
more  traditional  *'  literary"  methods,  where  there  is  no  doubt 
he  was  least  successful.      I  remember,  during  another  talk  I 
had  with  him  not  long  before  he  died,  we  chanced  to  speak  of 
a  recent  criticism  of  one  of  his  books,  highly  appreciative  in 
the  main,  but  including  the  remark  that  Mr.  Allen  wrote  now- 
adays a  little  more  hastily  than  formerly — though  what  won- 
der when  one  considered  his  enormous  productiveness,  etc. 

Grant  Allen,  who  seldom  saw  any  criticisms  of  h"    -T'ritings, 
and  refrained  purposely  from  subscribing  to  any  press-cutting 
agency,  was  pleased  with  the  review — but  he  laughed  good- 
humoredly  at  the  statement  that  he  wrote  less  carefully  than 
formerly.      "  Why  !  "  he  said,  "  I  take  ten  times  the  pains. 
Look  here  !  "  and  he  darted  off  to  his  study  with  one  of  his 
long,  eager  strides,  and  brought  out  a  type-written  manuscript. 
"  Look  here  !  "  he  sa'd,  "  does  this  look  like  carelessness  ?  " 
The  type-writing  was  like  a  moving  ant-hill  with  minute  in- 
numerable corrections  in  his  exquisite,  small  hand.      Of 
course,  I  didn't  say  that  I  regretted  these  evidences  of  a  grow- 
ing self-consciousness  in  his  writing,  and  that  the  old,  swift> 
nail-on-the-head  "  carelessness  "  was  best. 


I>" 


10 


Grant  Allen. 


There  are,  need  one  say,  as  many  ideals  of  literary  style 
as  there  are  real  writers.     The  style  Grant  Allen  was  born  to, 
the  style  that  was  the  man  himself  and  no  other,  belonged  to 
a  method  of  style  which  we  are  apt  to  regard  as  peculiarly 
modern,  but  which  in  reality  is  as  old  as  any  other — the  style 
founded  on  talk,  the  colloquial  style,  so  called,  though  the 
word  *  *  colloquial ' '  has  become  too  suggestive  of  a  certain 
confidential  unction  in  a  writer  to  allow  the  phrase  to  be  used 
with  safety.      It  is  a  style  which  does  not  readily  lend  itself 
to  quotation.      Its  metier  is  not  the  purple  passage.     I  have 
been  looking  through  "  Post-Prandial  Philosophy  "  to  see  if  I 
can  find  a  passage  which  may,  without  too  much  loss  of  blood, 
be  severed  from  its  life-giving  context,  in  illustration  of  the 
spirited  direct  way  of  writing  in  which  I  conceive  Grant 
Allen  to  have  been  at  his  best.     Really,  the  illustration  is  in- 
adequate, for  these  little  papers  are,  in  their  comparatively 
modest  way,  as  complete  and  organic  as  sonnets.      However, 
there  is  one,  '*  About  Abroad,"  which  may  endure  the  vivisec- 
tion, and  at  the  same  time  provide  us  with  a  characteristic  ex- 
ample of  Grant  Allen's  way  of  looking  at  things. 

The  place  known  as  Abroad  is  not  nearly  so  nice  a  country  to  live  in  as 
England.     The  people  who  inhabit  Abroad  are  called  Foreigners.     They  are 
in  every  way  and  at  all  times  inferior  to  Englishmen.     These  Post-Prandials 
used  once  to  be  provided  with  a  sting  in  their  tail,  like  the  common  scorpion. 
By  way  of  change,  I  turn  them  out  now  with  a  sting  in  their  head,  like  the 
common  mosquito.     Mosquitoes  are  much  less  dangerous  than  scorpions,  but 
they're  a  deal  more  irritating.     Not  that  I  am  sanguine  enough  to  expect  I 
shall  irritate  Englishmen.     ...     To  most  Englishmen,  the  world  divides 
itself  naturally  into  two  unequal  and  non-equivalent  portions — Abroad  and 
England.     Of  these  two,  Abroad  is  much  the  larger  country  ;  but  England, 
though  smaller,  is  vastly  more  important.     Abroad  is  inhabited  by  French- 
men and  Germans,  who  speak  their  own  foolish  and  chattering  languages. 
Part  of  it  is  likewise  pervaded  by  Chinamen,  who  wear  pigtails  ;   and  the  out- 
lying districts  belong  to  the  poor  heathen,  chiefly  interesting  as  a  field  of  mis- 
sionary enterprise,  and  a  possible  market  for  Manchester  piece-goods.     .     .     . 
If  you  ask  most  people  what  has  become  of  Tom,  they  will  answer  at  once 
with  the  specific  information,  "Oh,  Tom  has  gone  Abroad,"     I  have  one 
stereotyped  rejoinder  to  an  answer  like  that — "  What  part  of  Abroad, 
please  ?  "     That  usually  stumps  them.     Abroad  is  abroad  ;   and,  like  the  gen- 
tleman who  was  asked  in  examination  to  "name  the  minor  prophets,"  they 
decline  to  make  invidious  distinctions.     It  is  nothing  to  them  whether  he  is 
tea-planting  in  the  Himalayas,  or  r,heep-farming  in  Australia,  or  orange- 
growing  in  Florida,  or  ranching  in  Colorado.     If  he  is  not  in  England,  why 
then  he  is  elsewhp'-e  ;   and  elsewhere  is  Abroad,  and  is  indivisible.     ... 


W 


^v- 


), 


4 

u  - 


Grant    Allen. 


11 


^v- 


People  will  tell  you,  "  Foreigners  do  this  ;  "  "  Foreigners  do  that ;  " 
"  Foreigners  smoke  so  much;  "  "  Foreigners  always  take  coffee  for  breakfast." 
"Indeed,"  I  love  to  answer,  "I've  never  observed  it  myself  in  Central  Asia." 
.     .     .     Would  it  surprise  you  to  learn  that  most  people  live  in  Asia  ? 
Would  it  surprise  you  to  learn  that  most  people  are  poor  benighted  heathen, 
and  that,  of  the  remainder,  most  people  are  Mahommedans,  and  that,  of  the 
Christians,  who  come  next,  most  people  are  Roman  Catholics,  and  that,  of 
the  other  Christian  sects,  most  people  belong  to  the  Greek  Church,  and  that, 
last  of  all,  we  get  Protestants,  more  particularly  Anglicans,  Wesleyans,  Bap- 
tists ?     Have  you  ever  really  realized  the  startling  fact  that  England  is  an 
island  off  the  coast  of  Europe  ?  that  Europe  is  a  peninsula  at  the  end  of 
Asia  .''  that  France,  Germany,  Italy,  are  the  fringe  of  Russia  ?     Have  you 
ever  really  realized  that  the  English-speaking  race  lives  mostly  in  America  ? 
that  the  country  is  vastly  more  populous  than  London  ?  that  our  class  is  the 
froth  and  scum  of  society  ?     Think  these  things  out,  and  try  to  measure 
them  on  the  globe.     And  when  you  speak  of  Abroad,  do  please  specify  what 
part  of  it. 

This,  I  submit,  is  very  good  writing;  and,  like  all  good 
writing,  very  pleasant  writing.      Its  interest  for  us  does  not 
end  in  the  delivery  of  its  message.    It  is  a  pleasure  to  read  for 
its  own  sake — for  the -unmistakable  sound  of  a  man's  voice  be- 
hind it,  one  man's  voice  and  no  other's,  the  sense  of  nearness 
it  brings  across  the  page  to  a  forcible,  thinking,  humorous, 
really  human  human  being.     It  is  not  only  clever,  it  is  good 
writing,  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word.      You  may  see  little  in 
it  to  wonder  at.      I  never  said  it  was  wonderful,  or  great. 
Writing,  like  men  and  women,  need  not  be  great  to  be  good. 
But  this  I  will  hazard,  that  such  "  mere  journalistic  "  writ- 
ing, backed  by  a  personality  such  as  Grant  Allen's,  is  more 
likely  to  engage  the  attention  of  that  much-courted  tribunal, 
posterity,  than  the  sugar-candy  euphuism,  the  imitation  Stev- 
enson, which  passes  for  high  art  in  the  moment,  and  towards 
which  Grant  Allen,  in  the  innocence  of  his  heart,  used  some- 
times, I  know,  to  cast  longing  eyes.      Of  course,  the  passage 
I  have  quoted  is  only  an  illustration  in  little  of  a  style  which 
Grant  Allen  wielded  no  less  successfully  on  a  broader  canvas 
and  with  a  fuller  brush.      Probably  the  fullest,  most  mas- 
terly writing  he  ever  achieved  is  contained  in  the  numerous 
articles  which  he  contributed  to  the  "  Fortnightly  Review." 
These  articles  will,  no  doubt,  be  collected  some  day.      Those 
relating  to  anthropology  and  folk-lore  have  already  been 
worked  into  his  book  on  "  The  Evolution  of  the  Idea  of 


■m 


12 


Grant    Allen. 


God."     Readers  in  England — of  course,  I  mean  "  popular" 
readers — who  are  unfortunate  enough  to  think  somewhat  in 
advance  of  their  fellows,  owe  more  than  perhaps  they  remem- 
ber to  those  stimulating  germinal  articles  in  which  Grant 
Allen  earliest  and  most  successfully  sowed  the  dragon's  teeth 
which  produced  him  such  a  plentiful  crop  of  those  armed  men, 
the  critics.      And  in  one  of  those  articl'^s,  particularly,  one 
which  necessarily  subjected  him  to  their  blindest  misunder- 
standing,— I  refer  to  "  The  New  Hedonism," — he  came 
iiearest,  I  think,  to  fulfilling  that  wistfully-held  ideal  of  dec- 
orative prose  to  which  I  have  made  reference.     What  a  tapes- 
try can  be  made  out  of  sheer  knowledge,  this  passage,  I 
think,  successfully  illustrates  : 


:r 


Not  otherwise  is  it  with  the  beauty  that  appeals  to  the  eye.     Every  lovely 
object  in  organic  nature  owes  its  loveliness  direct  to  sexual  selection.     The 
whole  aesthetic  sense  in  animals  had  this  for  its  origin.     Every  spot  on  the 
feathery  wings  of  butterflies  was  thus  produced  ;   every  eye  on  the  gorgeous, 
glancing  plumage  of  the  peacock.     The  bronze  and  golden  beetles,  the  flash- 
ing blue  of  the  dragon-fly,  the  brilliant  colors  of  tropical  moths,  the  lamp  of 
the  glow-worm,  the  gleaming  light  of  the  fire-fly  in  the  thicket,  spring  from 
the  same  source.     The  infinite  variety  of  crest  and  gorget  among  the  irides- 
cent humming-birds  ;  the  glow  of  the  trogon,  the  barbets  among  the  palm- 
blossoms  ;  the  exquisite  plumage  of  the  birds  of  paradise  ;  the  ball-and- 
socket  ornament  of  the  argus  pheasant ;  the  infinite  hues  of  parrot  and 
macaw  ;  the  strange  bill  of  the  gaudy  toucan,  and  the  crimson  wattles  of  the 
turkey,  still  tell  one  story.      The  sun-birds  deck  themselves  for  their  courtship 
in  ruby  and  topaz,  in  chrysoprase  and  sapphire.     Even  the  antleru  of  deer, 
the  twisted  horns  of  antelopes,  and  the  graceful  forms  or  dappled  coats  of  so 
many  other  mammals  have  been  developed  in  like  manner  by  sexual  selection. 
The  very  fish  in  the  sea  show  similar  results  of  aesthetic  preferences.     The 
butterfly  fins  of  the  gurnard  and  the  courting  colors  of  the  stickleback  have 
but  one  explanation.     .     .     .     Fven  the  basis  of  the  Jance,  and,  therefore, 
to  a  great  extent  of  the  lyric,  poetic,  and  dramatic  faculty,  is  closely  bound 
up  in  like  manner  with  the  choice  in  pairing.     The  minuets  of  the  blackcock, 
the  aerial  antics  of  the  peewit,  the  meeting-places  and  ball-rooms  of  so  many 
grouse  and  other  game-birds,  the  strutting  of  the  peacock,  the  display  of  the 
argus  pheasant,  the  coquetting  of  butterflies,  the  strange  courtship  of 
spiders.     ...  .    . 

A  little  more  self-conscious  art,  a  little  less  ethical  enthu- 
siasm, could  have  made  a  little  more  of  the  material, — such 
material  of  strangely  shaped  and  colored  words  as  "  trogon," 
and  "  barbet,"  and  "  toucan," — but  merely  to  bring  together, 
in  the  inspiration  of  argument  rather  than  art,  so  many  short 


■■*t* 


-It. 


Grant   Allen. 


13 


clauses,  each  containing  at  least  one  purple  or  orange  name, 
stimulating  to  the  imagination  either  by  strangeness  or  famil- 
iarity, was  no  small  literary  success. 

One  more  quotation  I  shall  make,  again  illustrative  of  Grant 
Allen's  occasional  success  in  what  I  daresay  he  would  have 
called  "  the  higher  style,"  a  passage  in  which  for  once  he 
dropped  the  irony  which  was  his  usual  manner,  and  allowed 
the  aspiration  of  his  heart,  the  simple  sincerity  of  his  hope, 
to  escape  in  a  passage  of  eloquent  pleading,  through  which   . 
blows  the  keen  sweet  air  one  of  the  purest  of  recent  lives 
could  alone  breathe.      It  is  from  the  preface  to  his  least  fortu- 
nate book,  his  second  "  hill-top  novel,- '  "  The  British  Barba- 
rians ' ' : 

I  am  writing  in  my  study  on  a  heather-olad  hill-top.     When  I  raise  my  eye 
from  my  sheet  of  foolscap,  it  falls  upon  iiiles  and  miles  of  broad,  open  moor- 
land.    My  window  looks  out  upon  unsullu^a  nature.     Everything  around  is 
fresh,  and  pure,  and  wholesome.     Through  the  open  casement  the  scent  of 
the  pines  blows  in  with  the  breeze  from  the  neighboring  firwood.     Keen  airs 
sigh  through  the  pine-needles.     Grasshoppers  chirp  from  deep  tangles  of 
bracken.     The  song  of  a  skylark  drops  from  the  sky  like  soft  rain  in  sum- 
mer ;  in  the  evening,  a  night-jar  croons  to  us  his  monotonously  passionate 
love-wail,  from  his  perch  on  the  gnarled  boughs  of  the  wind-swept  larch  that 
crowns  the  upland.     But  away  below  ia  the  valley,  as  night  draws  on,  a  lurid 
glare  reddens  the  north-eastern  horizon.     It  marks  the  spot  where  the  great 
wen  of  London  heaves  and  festers.     Up  here  on  the  freer  hills  the  sharp  air 
blows  in  upon  us,  limpid  and  clear  from  a  thousand  leagues  of  open  ocean  ; 
down  there  in  the  crowded  town  it  stagnates  and  ferments,  polluted  with  the 
diseases  and  vices  of  centuries.     .     .     .     Far,  far  below,  the  theatre  and  the 
music-hall  spread  their  garish  gas-lamps.     Let  who  will  heed  them.     But 
here  on  the  open  hill-top  we  know  fresher  and  more  wholesome  delights. 
Those  feverish  joys  allure  us  not.     O  decadents  of  the  town,  we  have  seen 
your  sham  idyls,  your  tinsel  Arcadias.     ij/e  have  tired  of  their  stuffy  atmo- 
sphere, their  dazzling  jets,  their  weary  ways,  their  gaudy  dresses  ;  we  shun 
the  sunken  cheeks,  the  lack-lustre  eyes,  the  heart-sick  souls  of  your  painted 
goddesses.  .     .     Your  halls  are  too  stifling  with  carbonic  acid  gas ;  for  us, 

'  we  breathe  oxygen.     .     .     .     How  we  smile,  we  who  live  here,  when  some 
dweller  in  the  mists  and  smoke  of  the  valley  confounds  our  delicate  atmo- 
sphere, redolent  of  honey,  and  echoing  the  manifold  murmur  of  bees,  with 
that  stifling  miasma  of  the  gambling  hell  and  the  dancing  saloon  !     Trust  me, 
dear  friend,  the  moorland  air  is  far  other  than  you  fancy.     You  can  wander 
up  here  oljng  the  purple  ridges,  hand  locked  in  hand  with  those  you  love, 
without  J  ^ar  of  harm  to  yourself  or  your  comrade.     No  Bloom  of  Ninon  here, 
but  fresh  cheeks  like  the  peach-blossom  where  the  sun  has  kissed  it ;  no 
casual  fruition  of  loveless,  joyless  harlots,  but  life-long  saturation  of  your  own 
heart's  desire  in  your  own  heart's  innocence.     Ozone  is  better  than  all  the 
champagne  in  the  Strand  or  Piccadilly.     If  only  you  will  believe  it,  it  is 


i 


14 


Grant   Allen. 


purity,  and  life,  and  sympathy,  and  vigor.     Its  perfect  freshness  and  per- 
petual fount  of  youth  keep  your  age  from  withering.     It  crimsons  the  sunset, 
and  lives  in  the  afterglow.     If  these  delights  thy  mind  may  move,  leave,  oh, 
leave  the  meretricious  town,  and  come  to  the  airy  peaks. 

•      III. 

These  quotations  illustrate  not  merely  Grant  Allen's  talent 
for  literary  expression,  but  they  may  stand,  too,  as  illustra- 
tions of  the  kind  of  thought  he  best  cared  to  express,  and  the 
temper  in  which  he  strove  to  express  it.      Grant  Allen  was  one 
of  those  whom  an  inscrutable  Providence  creates  Englishmen 
(I  know,  of  course,  technically  he  was  Irish-French-Cana- 
dian) for  the  express  purpose  of  their  differing  on  every  con- 
ceivable questio  .  with  their  fellow-countrymen.      This  is  one     - 
of  the  many  ways  in  which  England  is  seen  to  be  in  the  pecu- 
liar care  of  the  invisible  powers.      Perhaps  the  soil  of  no 
other  nation  is  so  richly  fertilized  with  the  martyred  remains 
of  its  artists  and  thinkers.      Grant  Allen  was  one  of  those  true 
patriots  who  do  their  country  the  great  service  of  differing 
from  it  on  every  possible  occasion.     Was  there  any  subject  on 
which  Grant  Allen  agreed  with  England — or  any  subject  on 
which  England  agreed  with  Grant  Allen?     I  suppose  one 
might,  with  diligence,  find  one  or  two.      Read,  for  example, 
those  "  Plain  Words  on  the  Woman  Question,"  in  Number 
274  (October,  1889)  of  tne  "  Fortnightly  Review,"  and  you 
will  find  him  ten  years  ago  vigorously  sounding  that  anti-Mal- 
thusian  alarm  which  Zola  has  set  to  mighty  drums  in  "  Fe- 
condite,"  a  book  of  which,  one  hears,  England  has  as  yet  no 
need.     Yet,  let  it  by  all  means  be  allowed  that  Grant  Allen 
was  at  variance  with  his  country  on  most  other  questions.      He 
was  a  Home-Ruler,  a  Socialist,  an  "  Atheist  "  (so  called), 
and  (in  theory)  a  "  Free-Lover  " — everything  but  a  house- 
breaker.    I  could  think  of  nothing  worse  to  say  of  "him  were  I 
aduocatus  diaboli.     O  yes !  there  is  some  fear  that  he  was  a 
Little  Englander.     But  there  are  differences  which,  like  cer- 
tain bombs,  explode;  and  th^re  are  differences  which  fall 
softly  in  the  grass  of  oblivion,  and  are  forgotten.     England 
now  takes  socialism  and  atheism  (long  since  respectable  as 
"  agnosticism  ")  quite  calmly.     The  Home-Ruler  and  the    _ 


•A 


i '" 


Grant   Allen. 


IS 


«^ 


-' 


Little  Englander  it  keeps  alive  because  political  meetings 
must  have  something  to  play  with.     But — Free  Love  !  !    An 
evil  and  adulterous  generation  naturally  takes  that  seriously. 
Grant  Allen  was  at  liberty  to  call  London  a  "  squalid  vil- 
lage," or  to  plump  down  any  of  his  delicious  paradoxes,  such 
as  :   "  We  Celts  henceforth  will  rule  the  roost  in  Britain  "  ;  he 
might  protest  against  preserved  partridges,  or  say  what  he 
pleased  about  the  aristocracy;  but,  when  it  came  to  suggesting 
that  a  notoriously  painful  marriage  law  was  capable  of  im- 
provement,— a  marriage  law  which  necessitates  the  expensive 
safety-valve  of  the  divorce  court, — ah!  then  indeed  Grant 
Allen  sinned  the  sin  for  which  there  is  no  forgiveness  between 
the  North  and  the  Irish  seas.      Lord  Rosebery  recently  de- 
scribed us  with  pathetic  pathos  as  a  little  island  floating 
lonely  (and  unprotected)  in  these  northern  seas,  or  something 
similarly  pretty;  so,  indeed,  we  float,  very  lonely,  on  such  an 
important  question  as  the  comfortable  (merely  comfortable) 
relation  of  man  and  woman.      In  all  that  relates  to  that  we 
are  only  less  civilized  than  the  unspeakably  English  Turk. 
We  may,  indeed,  as  Mr.  Meredith  brilliantly  said,  have 
passed  Seraglio  Point,  but  certainly  we  have  not  rounded  Cape 
Turk. 

Grant  Allen  felt  this  limitation  on  the  part  of  his  country- 
men with  the  acuteness  of  a  sincere  and  melioristic  mind,  as 
two  much  greater  novelists,  Mr.  Meredith  and  Mr.  Hardy, 
not  to  speak  of  any  number  of  great  poets,  had  felt  it  before 
him,  and  he  determined  to  do  what  he  could  do  to  advance  a 
saner  ideal.      Thus  he  wrote  "  The  Woman  Who  Did." 

Grant  Allen  regarded  this  as  the  most  important  book  he 
ever  wrote.      Perhaps,  after  all,  he  was  right.      I  didn't  think 
so  when  I  first  read  it;  for  it  is  quite  certain  that,  technically 
speaking,  it  is  far  from  being  his  best  novel;  nor,  well  and 
sometimes  beautifully  written,  is  it  the  best — that  is,  the  most 
individually — written  of  his  books.     A  book,  however,  may 
be  a  bad  novel,  it  may  be  indifferently  written;  and  yet  it 
may  be  an  important  book.      "  Robert  Elsmere  "  was,  for 
England,  an  important  book.      "  Degeneration,"  for  all  its 
absurdities,  was  an  important  book.      Neither  book  was  "  lit- 


'■ui.  ■»• 


16 


Grant   Allen. 


erature,"  nor  science,  nor  anything  that  mattered  artistically 
or  anywise  technically.      Each  book  was  merely  a  poster — a 
poster,  a  vivid  advertising  shock  announcing  new  ideas ;  that 
is,  not  brand-new  ideas,  not  ideas  that  had  never  been  heard 
of  before  (for  where  shall  we  find  those  in  historic  times  ?), 
but  ideas  practically  untried  upon  large  areas  of  mankind, 
towards  the  trial  of  which  the  si  irit  of  the  age  seemed 
blindly  to  be  pushing.      Its  very  title  declared  **  The  Woman 
Wh-^  Did  "  to  be  a  poster  of  rebellion;  and,  as  such,  it  was  a 
rem.  rkably  conspicuous  success — for,  as  I  said  on  its  publica- 
tion, the  story  was  nought,  the  characters  were  puppets,  a 
philosopher's  puppets;  yet,  so  momentous  was  the  moral  idea 
it  advertised,  so  single-minded  and  pure-of-heart  was  the 
motive  enthusiasm  of  the  man  who  wrote  it,  that  it  sold  as 
though  it  had  been  some  really  interesting  romance  by  Miss 
Marie  Corelli  or  Mr.  Hall  Caine. 

I  do  it,  and  certainly  intend  it,  no  disrespect,  when  I 
speak  of  it  as  the  advertisement  of  an  idea.      There  is  nothing 
that  ideas  need  so  much  as  advertisement.     Grant  Allen 
always  had  this  happy  knack,  by  the  sheer  innocence  of  his 
almost  childlike  sincerity,  of  attracting,  or  shall  I  say,  repel- 
ling, immediate  attention  for  any  cause  he  cared  to  espouse. 
His  lightest  phrase  sounded  a  gong  which  summoned  his 
fellow-countrymen  to  put  out  with  all  their  might  the  fire  he 
had  just  kindled.      It  mattered  little  what  it  was  he  talked  of. 
He  could  not  avoid  making  the  poster  phrase,  the  poster  word. 
If  you  seriously  want  to  save  the  world,  you  have  first  got  to 
make  the  world  hear,  and  secondly,  make  the  world  throw 
stones.      Grant  Allen  had  a  really  enviable  faculty  of  provok- 
ing the  world  to  throw  stones.     He  was  like  a  great  speaker. 
However  unruly  his  audience,  he  had  but  to  raise  a  finger  of 
audacious  phrase,  and,  whatever  happened  afterwards,  he  was 
heard.      Take  a  long-since  tranquil  theme,  such  as  the  poetry 
of  Mr.  William  Watson.     James  Ashcroft  Noble  knew  it 
almost  before  it  was  born ;  he  wrote  of  it,  persuasively  as  he 
could  write,  in  important  journals,  such  as  the  "  Academy" 
and  the  "  Spectator.'-      At  one  time  Hutton  seemed  to  edit  the 
"  Spectator  "  for  the  very  proper  purpose  of  announcing  the 


I 


'Jf 


Granl    Allen. 


17 


\ 


3 


\ . 


truly  momentous  presence  in  our  midst  of  the  author  of 
*'  Wordsworth's  Grave."     The  present  writer  was  reciting 
it  with  inconsiderate  proselytism  quite  ten  years  ago.     Yet  the 
"  National  Review,"  in  which  it  appeared,  passed  virtually 
unnoticed,  save  by  the  little  band  who  looked  out  for  it,  know- 
ing it  was  to  appear.      An  unappreciated  genius,  Mr.  Watson 
wandered  unrecognized  on  the  Yorkshire  moors.     Then  Grant 
Allen  took  up  his  speaking  trumpet,  modestly  enough,  indeed, 
ai  he  always  did,  and  said  :   "  Let  there  be  William  Wat- 
son," and  there  was  William  Watson.     Small  critics,  who 
knew  as  little  of  the  poet  as  they  knew  of  his  trumpeter,  said  : 
What  does  Grant  Allen  know  about  poetry?     Grant  Allen,  the 
'*  popularizer  "  of  science,  the  self-confessed  manufacturer  of 
shoddy  fiction.      But  Grant  Allen  had  blown  his  trumpet,  that 
"  coarse  "  trumpet  of  his,  and  England — including  Lord 
Rosebery — heard.      Of  course,  Mr.  Watson  had  been  no  less  a 
poet  though  Grant  Allen  had  never  spoken,   'ust  as  Armenia 
had  been  Armenia  though  "  The  Purple  East  "  had  never  been 
written;  but  it  is,  after  all,  a  pleasant  thing  to  be  recognized 
as  William  Watson  a  little  ahead  of  posterity's  finding  it  out, 
and  I  am  sure  Mr.  Watson  remembers  with  gratitude  that  the 
noble,  forcible,  and  fascinating  personality  of  Grant  Allen  was 
once  enthusiastically  his  very  "effective  poster. 

Similarly,  in  regard  to  "  The  Woman  Who  Did  "  :  the 
ethical  motive  was,  of  course,  familiar  enough — old  as 
Shelley,  old  as  the  hills.      A  year  or  two  before  its  publica- 
tion Mr.  Meredith  had  published,  in  *"  Lord  Ormont  and  his 
Aminta,"  the  sympathetic  drama  of  similar  revolt,  but  the 
Conservative  Press  which  upholds  the  world — like  the  tortoise 
in  Buddhist  cosmogony — had  not  fallen  about  his  ears.      Mr. 
Meredith's  style  is  a  coat  of  mail  which  protects  the  most  in- 
novating idea.      But  there  was  a  deeper  reason  than  that. 
England  dreads  the  abstract;  give  it  plain,  common-sense, 
concrete  adultery,  and  it  will  forgive  and  forget.     But  of 
abstract  "  adultery  " — adultery  from  the  highest  ethical 
motives — it  is  suspicious.     And,  of  course,  in  a  sense  it  is 
right.     To  break  a  law  is  one  thing,  to  set  up  that  law- 
breaking  as  a  new  law  is  another.      Of  course,  in  *'  Lord 


18 


Grant   Allen. 


"*> 


Ormont  and  his  Aminta  "  Mr.  Meredith  did  that  very  thing. 
But  then  you  can  esoterically  exhibit  law-breaking  art  in  the 
protective  obscurity  of,  say,  The  Dudley  Gallery,  which  would 
provoke  a  storm  of  comment  if  placarded,  say,  at  the  Strand 
entrance  to  Waterloo  Bridge.      So  much  depends  on  where  the 
nude  in  truth  is  hung.      "  Lord  Ormont  and  his  Aminta  "  was 
a  warm  human  exception — in  spite  of  its  author  intending  to 
make  a  new  rule;  "  The  Woman  Who  Did  "  announced  an 
aggressive  new  rule.      It  possessed  no  humanity  to  excuse  it. 
It  sought  no  excuse.      It  was  intended  as  a  challenge,  and  its 
success  was  that  it  was  accepted  as  such.      That  it  should  be 
furiously  attacked  was  a  part  of  that  success;  otherwise  there 
had  been  no  necessity  to  write  it.      In  form  a  novel,  in  reality 
it  belongs  to  our  noble  series  of  change-demanding  pamphlets. 
As  literature  it  has  small  value ;  as  a  brilliant  noise  on  behalf 
of  human  progress  it  means  a  great  deal. 

Perhaps  it  were  as  well  to  explain  that,  while  in  the  ab- 
stract I  agreed  with  Grant  Allen's  theory  on  this  matter  long 
before  I  knew  Grant  Allen, — in  fact,  just  after  I  met  with 
Shelley  ! — later  experience  of  life  has  led  me  to  doubt  its 
practical,  working  efficiency.      Indeed,  I  am  venturous,  super- 
stitious, old-fashioned  enough  to  wonder  if,  at  all  events  for 
certain  natures,  there  is  not  a  more  radical  criticism  to  be 
made  of  those  theories.      Let  us  allow  that  there  are  happy 
natures  constituted  in  the  light  of  reason  who  can  love  accord- 
ing to  the  law  which  Grant  Allen  summarizes  in  this  neat 
quatrain  : 

I  hold  that  heart  full  poor  that  owns  its  boast  ' 

To  throb  in  tune  with  but  one  throbbing  breast. 

Who  numbers  many  friends,  loves  friendship  most ; 
Who  numbers  many  loves,  loves  each  love  best. 

I,  too,  thought  so  once,  but  I  have  come  to  realize  that 
what  Grant  Allen  meant  by  love  is  not  in  the  real  sense — 
that  is,  the  absurd,  the  tragic,  the  comic,  the  mystic  sense 
— love  at  all.      He  really  spoke  of  a  sort  of  sexual  comrade- 
ship.    Love  is  something  far  more  terrible.      It  has  nothing 
whatever  to  do  with  reason,  nothing  to  do  with  theories.     It 
burns  this  way,  it  burns  that.     But  the  flame  it  sets  alight  is 
for  one  martyr,  it  is  kindled  by  one  torch. 


"•I 


Grant  Allen. 


19 


■i^ 


Indeed,  as  I  ventured  sometimes  to  tell  him,  there  is  some- 
thing in  human  life,  in  human  nature,  which  I  think  Grant 
Allen  rather  missed;  something  mystic,  something  divinely 
and  devilishly  irrational  which  he  did  not  take  into  account  in 
his  melioristic  dreams.      Of  course,  it  is  the  way  of  all  moral- 
ists, and  Grant  Allen  was  a  moralist,  par  excellence.     Packed 
full  of  humanity  himself,  he  never  realized  what  one  can  only 
call  the  elaborate  waywardness  of  human  nature.      He  thought 
of  humanity  too  much  in  the  abstract.      He  thought  of  it  as 
composed  of  human  beings  amenable  to  reason,  ductible  to 
ideals.      Being  himself  a  nature  singularly  adaptable  to  the 
influence  of  right  thinking,  he  imagined  that  the  rest  of  the 
world  was  like  him.      Of  course  he  knew,  but  in  his  utopian- 
ism  he  hardly  remembered  sufficiently,  that  the  influence  of 
ideas  on  humanity  is  exceedingly  slow  and  laborious  and  in- 
deed superficial.     To  see  the  right  was  with  him  to  do  it. 
To  see  the  wrong  in  his  own  nature  was  at  least  to  struggle  to 
set  it  right.      His,  in  fact,  was  a  nature  singularly  conform- 
able to  moral  ideas.      But  average  human  nature  is  not.      It 
sees  the  right,  but  its  warm  life-forces  compel  it  to  do  the 
wrong.      As  Grant  Allen  once  wittily  said  of  a  friend,  hu- 
manity !'  longs  to  be  a  saint,  but  it  loves  to  be  a  sinner." 

I  think  it  was  this  in  Grant  Allen  which  closed  his  eyes  to 
the  beauty  of  London.      The  beauty  of  London,  if  one  may 
say  so,  is  the  beauty  of  a  richly-coloied  meerschaum.     It 
smells  rankly  of  old  romantic  sin.     With  its  freakish  rings  of 
rich  brown,  it  is,  side  by  side  with  a  nice  clean  new  meer- 
schaum, a  disgrace.      Life  has  had  its  way  with  it,  and  it  is 
colored  accordingly.      Now,  I  think  I  do  him  no  wrong  when 
I  say  that  Grant  Allen  rather  loved  the  new  meerschaum.      I 
don't  think  he  would  have  cared  much  to  live,  say,  in  an  old 
historic  house.      At  every  turn  it  would  have  reminded  him  of 
wrong  thinking,  of  crushing  social  wrong.      He  could  never 
have  slept  in  it.     The  "  monopolist  instincts  "  would  have 
shrieked  about  his  bed  at  night.      He  loved  the  beauty  of  new- 
made  things,  life  washed  clean  in  the  dawn;  and  I  am  far 
from  implying  that  he  was  anything  but  right  in  so  doing. 
The  beauty  of  antiquity  was,  I  imagine,  to  his  way  of  think- 


n 


w^ 


30 


Ghmt    Allen. 


ing,  partly  dirt  and  partly  superstition:  of  course,  I  mean 
mere  age, — that  is,  the  humanization  which  comes  to  any- 
thing through  mere  use.      1  am  hardly  writing  for  a  reader 
who  needs  to  be  told  of  his  appreciation,  his  exceptionally 
intuitive  interpretation,  of  the  definitely,  demonstrably,  beau- 
tiful things  of  antiquity.      His  knowledge  of  and  insight  into 
the  Italian  painters  of  the  Renaissance  is  well-known,  and  I 
have  had  few  more  fascinating  experiences  than  hearing  him 
expound  his  original  interpretation  of  the  symbolism  of,  say, 
Botticelli's  "  Primavera," — a  picture,  indeed,  sufficiently 
hackneyed  to  provide  opportunity  for  a  tour  de  force  of  original 
exposition. 

The  fact  remains  that  Grant  Allen  loved  human  ideals  more 
than  human  realities — as,  indeed,  we  all  should  do,  but  don't. 
This  ideality  accounts  for  the  unreality — as  fiction — of  such 
books  as  "  The  Woman  Who  Did  "  ;  but,  at  the  same  time,  it 
is  nothing  against  their  usefulness  as  brilliant  and  forcible 
social  tracts.      To  write  a  really  influential  tract — well,  what 
novel  since  that  lovely  tract  of  "  Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles  " 
is  worth  mentioning  beside  such  an  achievement? 

IV. 

I  am  thus  insidiously  led  up  to  Grant  Allen's  novels  with- 
out a  purpose.      Of  these  I  propose  to  say  little — for  a  good 
reason.     On  entering  into  friendship  with  Grant  Allen  it  was 
obligatory  to  make  one  promise  only, — never,  under  whatso- 
ever temptation,  to  read  one  of  his  "  commercial  "  novels.      I 
feel  myself  no  little  unworthy  as  I  think  that  my  poor  human 
nature  proved  incapable  of  strictly  fulfilling  this  condition. 
And,  indeed,  I  must  not  forget  Grant  Allen  made  one  excep- 
tion: **  For  Maimie's  Sake."     This  was  an  earlier  illustration 
of  '*  The  Woman  Who  Did  "  idea;  and,  though  there  is  much 
that  Grant  Allen  wrote  that  I  prefer  to  it,  I  admit  that  in 
"  Maimie  "  he  outlined  a  type  of  original  interest,  and  indeed 
created  the  only  living  woman  in  his  books.     For,  indeed,  in 
no  study  so  much  as  that  of  woman  would  his  passion  for  the 
abstract  so  absolutely  unfit  him  to  arrive  at  reality.     Man 
may  be  imperfectly  amenable  to  rule,  but  every  woman  is  an 
exception.     Woman,  indeed,  is  human  nature.  -    • 


Grant    Allen. 


21 


■<> 


■- 


I  once  meditated  an  appreciation  of  Grant  Allen's  **  pjt- 
boilers,"  which  only  accident  prevented  my  carrying  out;  and 
I'm  afraid,  unintentionally  indeed,  I  hurt  him  by  saying 
that  his  current  "  pot-boiler,"  "  Under  Sealed  Orders,"  was 
a  much  better  novel  than  "  The  Woman  Who  Did."     Some 
day  I  may  fulfil  my  old  intention,  and  I  think  I  should  rot 
find  it  difficult  to  prove  that  Grant  Allen  was  a  far  better  nov- 
elist than  he  had  the  smallest  interest  in  being. 

As  a  teller  of  the  short  story  he  is  admitted,  among  those 
who  know,  to  have  been  a  brilliant  pioneer.      It  was  an  appro- 
priate coincidence  that  very  shortly  before  his  death  he  should 
have  published  a  selection  of  twelve  of  the  most  important  of 
his  tales,  with  a  characteristic  confession  of  how  he  came  to 
be  a  story-teller  at  all.     Of  course,  he  was  a  born  story-teller; 
but,  as  all  gifts  are  the  revelation  of  accident,  it  was  the  acci- 
dent of  his  having  thrown  a  scientific  idea  into  the  form  of  a 
story  that  revealed  Grant  Allen's  story-telling  both  to  himself 
and  to  the  world.      His  best  stories  always  bore  the  mark  of 
this  accidental  origin.      They  were  always  the  illustration  of 
some  scientific  or  moral  conceptions, — from  the  famous  "  Rev- 
erend John  Greedy  "  to  "  The  Woman  Who  Did."     But  their 
success  was  that  they  lost  nothing  in  narrative  interest  on  that 
account.      ''  The  Child  of  the  Phalanstery,"  "  Ivan  Greet's 
Masterpiece,"  are  both,  so  to  speak,  allegorical  in  intention; 
but,  all  the  same,-  they  hold  and  move  one  just  as  if  they  were 
the  simplest  emotional  stories,  and  not  in  the  least  the  attrac- 
tive envelope  of  an  ethical  pill.      Besides,  sheerly  as  story- 
telling, some  of  Grant  Allen's  stories  qualify  him  as  an  in- 
ventor.    •'  The  Reverend  John  Greedy,"  "  Mr.  Chung,"  and 
many  other  such  stories,  justify  his  timid  enough  claim  to  be 
one  of  the  earliest  writers  of  "  the  romance  of  the  clash  of 
civilizations."     He  used  sometimes  to  say  that,  mis-spent  as 
his  life  had  been,  he  was  the  maker  of  the  phrase:  "  gone 
Fantee."     With  touching  humility,  in  the  preface  to  that  col- 
lection of  "  Twelve  Tales  "  just  referred  to,  he  mentions  with 
characteristic  (let  one  say  for  him,  absurd)  deference  "  the 
Kiplings,"  the  '*  Wellses  "  :  "  "^  shall  be  a.  iply  content  if  our 
masters  permit  me  to  pick  up  the  crumbs  that  fall  from  the 


S 


/^ 


22 


Grant    Allen. 


I 


table  of  the  Hardys,  the  Kiplings,  the  Merediths,  and  the 
Wellses." 

I  have  nothing  to  say  to  **  the  Hardys  "  and  "  the  Mere- 
diths," except  to  protest  against  a  somewhat  hasty  use  of 
the  plural.      But  *'  the  Kiplings  "  and  "  the  Wellses  "  ! 
Well,  I  kow-tow  (as  Grant  Allen  would  say)  to  those  brilliant 
writers  with  all  my  heart ;  but  to  be  able  to  tell  a  tale  better 
than  Grant  Allen — that  is,  to  go  one  better  than  one's  tutor — 
does  not  prove  one  a  more  important  person  than  Grant  Allen. 
"  No  talent  can  be  supremely  effective,"  said  that  very  clear- 
sighted observer,  George  Henry  Lewes,  "  unless  it  act  in 
close  alliance  with  certain  moral  qualities."      "Art  "  is  only 
of  supreme  importance  when  it  is  either  the  embodiment  of 
that  beauty  which  is  the  final  unquestionable  holiness,  or 
when  it  is  the  voice  of  the  universal  absolutes  of  man.      To  be 
"  diabolically  clever  "  is  not  the  same  thing.      To  cinemato- 
graph the  past,  or  to  cinematograph  the  present,  is  nothing 
like  so  important  as — to  pray  with  all  your  heart  for  the 
future.      Prayer  is  usually  allowed  to  be  exempt  from  minor 
aesthetic  criticism. 

And  this  leads  me  to  speak  of  a  little  volume  which  mu-.t 
certainly  not  go  uncelebrated  here,  and  which  in  the  whole 
enormous  library  of  Grant  Allen's  writings  has  a  more  impor- 
tant place  than  has  yet  been  allowed  to  it,  or  than  he  himself 
would  have  claimed  for  it, — the  little  volume  of  his  poems 
quaintly  entitled:  ''  The  Lower  Slopes,  Reminiscences  of  Ex- 
cursions round  the  Base  of  Helicon,  undertaken  for  the  most 
part  in  early  manhood."      If  it  contained  no  other  poem  than 
this  striking  "  Prayer,"  it  would  have  a  sufficient  raison 
d' etre  : 

A  crowned  Caprice  is  god  of  this  world  ; 
On  his  stony  breast  are  his  white  wings  furled. 
No  ear  to  listen,  no  eye  to  see, 
No  heart  to  feel  for  a  man  hath  he. 

But  his  pitiless  arm  is  swift  to  smite  ; 
And  his  mute  lips  utter  one  word  of  might, 
'Mid  the  clash  of  gentler  souls  and  rougher, 
"Wrong  must  thou  do,  or  wrong  must  suffer." 
Then  grant,  0  dumb,  blind  god,  at  least  that  we 
Rather  the  sufferers  than  the  doers  be. 


Grant   Allen. 


23 


I  -was  glad  to  see  that  Mr.  Lang  in  a  beautiful,  so  to  say- 
playfully  elegiac,  article  apropos  Grant  Allen's  death,  re- 
ferred to  him  as  "  a  sad  good  Christian."     I  too  had  ven- 
tured to  write  that,  like  Shelley,  he  was  all  his  life  a  Chris- 
tian without  knowing  it.      Certainly  his  nature  was  filled  with 
a  pity  which  in  the  depth  of  its  tenderness  was  distinctively 
*'  Christian."     His  favorite  motto  was:  '*  Self-development  • 
is  greater  than  self-sacrifice  "  ;  but,  when  one  remembers  the 
deliberate  way  in  which  he  sacrificed  all  his  literary  and 
scientific  dreams  k)  the  domestic  ideal,  and  preached  con- 
stantly in  his  stories  that  a  man  with  a  wife  and  children  must' 
be  husband  or  father  first  and  artist  afterwards,  one  realizes 
that,  when  his  abstract  theories  were  put  to  the  human  test. 
Grant  Allen  considered  first  the  human  need  in  the  situation 
and  last  of  all  his  theories.     Moralist  as  he  was,  he  was  far 
indeed  from  being  a  doctrinaire. 

Recently  re-reading  some  of  his  old  articles  in  the  '*  Fort- 
nightly Review,"  I  came  upon  i.  characteristic  touch  of  his 
pity  in  a  quaintly  unexpected  place, — a  review  of  Stevenson's 
"  Travels  with  a  Donkey."     Grant  Allen  was  even  then  gen- 
erously "  discovering  "  other  people.      It  is  to  be  feared  that 
the  jesting  thanks  of  one  of  his  protegees  too  often  came  true: 
"  Need  I  say  that  you  have  earned  my  blackest  ingratitude  "  ? 
"  There  is  many  a  true  word  spoken  in  jest,"  was  Grant 
Allen's  quiet  comment  on  the  occasion.      But,  to  return  to 
Stevenson,  after  praising  the  book  for  its  various  now  classir 
cal  qualities.  Grant  Allen  concludes  thus:  "  Nevertheless, 
since  one  cannot  wholly  divorce  oneself  from  the  ethical  feel- 
ing of  one's  age,  I  must  confess  that  I  should  have  liked  Mr. 
Stevenson  better  if  he  had  beaten  his  donkey  less  unmerci- 
fully, and,  above  all,  if  he  had  not  used  that  wooden  goad, 
with  its  eighth  of  an  inch  of  pin.     This  is  not  the  place  to 
discuss  the  broad  question  of  *  no  morality  in  art '  ;  but  most 
Englishmen  will  perhaps  feel  pained  rather  than  amused  by 
the  description  of  poor  Modestine's  many  stripes,  or  of  her 
foreleg  '  no  better  than  raw  beef  on  the  inside.'  "     Grant 
Allen  was  unlike  his  younger  contemporaries  in  being  unable 
to  enjoy  cruelty.      He  could  not  enjoy  cruelty  in  any  form,  not 
even  in  a  book. 


24 


Grant   Allen. 


Why  should  a  sob 

For  the  vaguest  smart 
One  moment  throb 

Through  the   tiniest  heart  ? 

he  indignantly  exclaims  in  a  poem  in  which,  a  propos  a  moth 
in  a  candle  flame,  he  arraigns  the  devil  of  pain  in  the 
universe. 

Mr.  Lang  has  spoken  of  Grant  Allen  as  "  a  master  of  the 
ballade,"  and,  to  illustrate  how  successfully  he  could  wield 
the  more  stately  measures  of  English  verse,  I,  may  quote  these 
fwo  verses  from  his  fine  Arnoldlan  meditation,  "  In  Magdalen 
Tower": 

"This  very  tree,  whose  life  is  our  life's  sister. 

We  know  not  if  the  ichor  in  her  veins 
Thrill  with  fierce  joy  when  April  dews  have  kissed  her 

Or  shrink  in  anguish  from  October  rains. 
We  search  the  mighty  world  above  and  under, 

Yet  nowhere  find  the  soul  we  fain  would  find. 
Speech  in  the  hollow  rumbling  of  the  thunder, 

Words  in  the  whispering  wind. 

We  yearn  for  brotherhood  with  lake  and  mountain, 

Our  conscious  soul  seeks  conscious  sympathy. 
Nymphs  in  the  coppice.  Naiads  in  the  fountain, 

Gods  on  the  craggy  height  and  roaring  sea. 
We  find  but  soulless  sequences  of  matter, 

Fact  linked  to  fact  by  adamantine  rods, 
Eternal  bonds  of  former  sense  and  latter, 

Dead  laws  for  living  gods. 

Grant  Allen's,  too,  was  the  happy  characterization  of  Fitz- 
Gerald's  Omar  as  "  This  rose  of  Iran  on  an  English  stock." 
But  I  must  quote  no  more  from  a  little  book  which  easily 
proves  that  Grant  Allen,  while  he  was,  what  is  still  more  im- 
portant, a  poet  in  the  larger  sense,  in  temperament,  in  prose, 
was  also  a  skilful  and  forcible  poet  in  verse. 


In  fact,  he  was,  perhaps,  the  most  variously  gifted  man  of 
letters  of  his  time.      Sheerly  as  a  literary  workman  he  can  sel- 
dom have  been  equalled.    ,  His  capacity  for  working  under 
every  disadvantage  of  circumstance  was  almost  superhuman; 


-*■ 


c 

c 


f.   I 


Grant  Allen, 


25 


Bi- 


as his  obedient  adaptability  to  the  demands  of  the  public 
or  the  publishers  by  whom  he  had  to  live  was  as  astonishing 
as  it  was  tragic.     When,  to  his  surprise,  as  he  tells  in  his 
preface  to  the  "  Twelve  Tales  "  already  referred  to,  Mr. 
Chatto  asked  him  to  write  stories,  he  characteristically  tells 
how:  "  Not  a  little  surprised  at  this  request,  I  sat  down  like 
an  obedient  workman,  and  tried  to  write  one  at  my  employer's 
bidding." 

Similarly,  on  a  larger  scale,  when  Sir  George  Newnes 
,  offered  a  thousand  pounds  for  a  sensational  novel,  he  produced 
"What's  Bred  in  the  Bone  "  with  cynical  cleverness.      That 
a  man  of  his  calibre  should  have  been  compelled  thus  to  pros- 
titute gifts  so  important,  however  brave  and  laughing  a  face 
he  put  upon  it,  is  one  of  the  saddest  things  in  recent  literary 
history,  as  it  is  eloquent  once  more  of  the  cruel  indifference  to 
the  arduous  conditions  of  literary  creation  in  a  country  which, 
nevertheless,  plumes  itself  particularly  upon  its  noble  litera- 
ture.    But  that  he  was  able  to  do  it  so  brilliantly  will,  doubt- 
less, be  the  feature  of  the  case  which  will  most  fill  the  down- 
trodden literary  mind  with  envy. 

In  the  mere  mechanical — but  how  important — matter  of 
"  turning  out  "  his  "  copy  "  he  was  quite  amazing.     Any  one 
who  has  stayed  in  his  house  will  remember  how  his  type- 
writer could  be  heard  as  yju  crossed  the  hall,  punctually  be- 
ginning to  click  at  nine  every  morning,  and,  if  you  eaves- 
dropped, you  would  seldom  note  a  pause  in  its  rapid  clicking. 
I  don't  think  that  Grant  Allen  can  even  once  in  his  life  have 
**  stopped  for  a  word."     Interruptions  made  no  difference.      I 
have  known  him  stop  in  the  middle  of  a  sentence  at  the  sound 
of  the  luncheon  gong,  and  then,  having  found  on  repairing  to 
the  dining-room  that  the  gong  was  a  little  premature,  go  back 
to  his  type-yrriter  and  finish  the  sentence  and  begin  another. 
Like  all  men  who  do  much  in  this  world,  he  had  a  genius  for 
using  up  remnants  of  time.      He  had,  too,  an  almost  Glad- 
stonian  power  of  concentration.     Whatever  was  going  on,  he 
could  write  if  he  Jiad  made  up  his  mind  to.      I  think  that  the 
only  thing  that  ever  worried  him  was  a  picture  askew  or  a 
pot  out  of  its  place.      He  couldn't  'je  happy  till  he  had  set  that 


26 


Grant  Allen, 


right.       Otherwise,  however,  most  things  could  happen  without 
their  interfering  with  the  strong  current  of  his  thought  bent 
on  expressing  itself.      One  reminiscence  to  the  point  I  always 
recall  when  I  think  of  him  in  this  connection.      Some  five 
years  ago  I  was  domiciled  in  his  house  for  many  weeks.      I 
was  there  because  Grant  Allen  and  his  brave  and  beautiful 
wife  had  taken  to  heart  a  private  sorrow  of  mine,  with  a 
personal  sympathy  such  as  few  friends  are  capable  of.      There 
were  days  when  I  didn't  feel  quite  equal  to  the  journalism  I 
had  undertaken  to  do ;   and  I  remember  that  on  one  of  them 
Grant  Allen  offered  to  write  a  brief  review  for  me.      If  I  re- 
member rightly,  the  book  was  that  which  first  revealed  to  us 
the  charming  personality  of  Miss  Fiona  Macleod — "  Pha- 
rais."      It  chanced,  too,  that  on  this  particular  day  certain 
other  friends  were  staying  in  the  house,  who  were  interested 
to  see  Grant  Allen  use  his  typewriter.      Some  five  of  us 
gathered  round  him  as  he  sat  down  to  it.      "  Well,"  he  said, 
'*  what  shall  I  write?     Oh,  I  might  as  well  write  that  re- 
view " — and  off  he  went,  and  in  something  like  ten  minutes  he 
■  had  written  five  hundred  bright  pointed  words,  for  which  Miss 
Fiona  Macleod  must,  I  am  sure,  have  been  very  grateful,  and 
which  she  will  no  doubt  admire  all  the  more  for  this  con- 
fession of  their  true  authorship.      Perhaps  I  may  be  allowed 
to  add,  as  a  journalist  who  has  still  to  go  on  earning  many 
loaves,  that  reviews  signed  by  my  name  are  not  usually 
written  by  any  one  more  distinguished  than  myself.      But  I  re- 
called this  incident  only  to  illustrate  Grant  Allen's  capacity 
for  working  brilliantly  under  all  circumstances.      There  were 
we  five  people  bending  over  him,  but  he  thought  absolutely 
nothing  about  us.      He  was  busy  with  "  the  Celtic  move- 
ment," and  something  he  wanted  to  say  about  it.      "We  were 
hardly  phantasmagoria. 

So  I  come  to  the  man  himself,  to  the  personal  loss.     That 
loss  needs  an  elegy  for  its  expression.      Nowadays  we  write 
our  elegies  in  the  form  of  hurried  leading  articles,  and  per- 
haps such  a  column  of  valedictory  prose  as  Mr.   Lang's 
column  in  the  "  Daily  News  "  is  a  more  real  expression  of 
loss  than  that  artistic  sorrow  remembered  in  tranquillity  which 


'' 


Grant   Allen. 


27 


elaborates  an  "  In  Memoriam."     When  the  wreath  is  so 
magnificent,  one  is  apt  to  forget  our  sorrow  in  our  aesthetic 
self-gratulati0n  over  our  wreath. 

Mr.  Frederic  Harrisor.,  in  his  funeral  oration,  laid  stress, 
over  and  over  again,  as  I  was  glad  to  note,  on  two  elements  of 
Grant  Allen's  character, — hia  courage  and  his  "  militant  sin- 
cerity."     Yes,  the  cjurage  hidden  in  that  frail  frame  of  his 
was  almost  pathetic;  and  he  was  certainly  the  sincerest  man  I 
have  ever  known.      He  possessed  the  simple  trjuthfulness  of 
genius,  and  perhaps  one  might  say  more  particularly,  of  scien- 
tific genius.      It  is  the  business  of  the  man  of  science  to  tell 
the  truth;  it  is  his  raison  d'etre.      He  is  so  concerned  to  "  find 
out ' '  that  he  never  conceives  that  there  can  be  any  necessity 
to  conceal.      That  is  why  he  so  often  shocks  his  fellows — in 
the  pure  innocence  of  discovery.      I  don't  think,  as  I  have 
said  elsewhere,  that  Grant  Allen  ever  had  an  arriere  pensee  in 
his  life.      He  never  realized  the  necessity  of  the  social  lie,  or 
any  other  form  of  dissimulation.      Some  of  us  more  worldly- 
wise,  and  thus  on  a  lower  level  than  he,  would  sometimes  pro- 
test, on  his  own  behalf,  against  his  extreme  open-mindedness 
on  such  matters  as  the  commercial  disabilities  of  telling  the 
truth.      He  was,  of  course,  in  the  main  a  financial  success, 
but  there  was  a  brief  period  after  "  The  Woman  Who  Did  " 
when  publishers  and  editors  fought  shy  of  him;  and  during 
that  period  he  would  confide  to  any  afternoon  caller,  with  per- 
fect simplicity,  and  not  the  smallest  sense  of  "  martyrdom," 
that  he  stood  idle  in  the  market-place,  because  no  one  dared  to 
hire  him.      I  have  heard  him  say  frankly  to  a  certain  young 
writer,  during  an  interchange  of  "  shop  "  :  "  Why,  I  never 
received  so  much  for  a  novel  in  my  life  !  "      Yet  he  was  very 
well  paid,  as  literary  payment  goes.     Any  one  who  cares  can 
share  his  printed  confidences  in  this  matter,  and  enjoy  an  ex- 
cellent example  of  his  style  in  his  old  "  Idler  "  article  on 
"  My  First  Book,"  since  reprinted,  with  other  confessions, 
by  Messrs.   Chatto  &  Windus.     It  ends  with  this  now-famous 
advice:  *'  Don't  take  to  literature  if  you've  capital  enough  in 
hand  to  buy  a  good  broom,  and  energy  enough  to  annex  a 
vacant  crossing." 


>. ' 


28 


Grant   Allen. 


f\ 


h 


I 


Grant  Allen  was  too  great  to  tell  lies,  even  white  lies.      He 
never  realized  the  necessity.      He  could  compromise  to  the 
extent  of  doing  brilliantly  the  work  he  hated,  but  more  he 
would  not  do.      No  necessity,  no  torture,  would  have  persuaded 
him  to  deny,  or  suppress,  the  truth  that  was  in  him.      He 
might  write  of  something  else,  but,  whenever  he  was  obliged 
to  write  of  vital  matters,  whatever  it  cost  him,  he  told  the 
truth.  t 

Also,  he  was,.  I  think,  the  most  completely  **  emanci- 
pated "   of  any  recent  English  mind  expressing  itself  in  litera- 
ture.     I  never  observed  a  trace  of  that  succumbing  to  the  in- 
herited habits  of  thought  and  feeling  which  even  the  most 
"  advanced  "  thinkers  have  developed  towards  the  close  of 
life.      He  was  entirely  devoid  of  any  form  of  "  superstition." 
His  reason  was,  to  the  last,  master  of  the  house  of  life.      Per- 
haps he  saw  a  little  too  clearly,  for,  as  his  most  famous 
protegee  writes: 

They  see  not  clearliest 
Who  see  all  things  clear. 

Perhaps  Grant  Allen  too  confidently  set  up  Darwin  and  Mr. 
Herbert  Spencer  in  the  place  of  his  lost  Hebrew  prophets. 
There  is,  as  I  said  above,  something  mystic  in  human  life 
that  he  refused  to  consider.      With  the  presumptuous  flamboy- 
ance of  youth  I  sometimes  told  him  so.      Yet,  at  the  same 
time,  no  one  had  such  an  overwhelming  cosmic  sense  of  the 
wonder  of  the  universe.      His  wonder  in  presence  of  that  ap- 
palling spectacle  perhaps  dwarfed  his  appreciation  of  the 
greater  mystery  of  the  soul  of  man.      The  brilliant  organiza- 
tion of  the  universe,  perhaps,  a  little  distracted  him  from  the 
human  miracle.      I  wish  I  could  have  borrowed  his  phono- 
graphic memory  to  record  a  spoken  rhapsody  of  his  of  the 
wonder,  not  of  the  world,  but  of  the  worlds,  gently  directed  at 
me  one  evening  in  answer  to  some  absurd  boyish  criticism  of 
his  way  of  thought.     I  remember  it  only. as  music — as  I  re- 
member most  of  his  talk. 

And  what  an  amazing  talker  be  was !     No  pose-talk,  but 
talk  easily  born  of  his  knowledge  and  love  of  the  subjent  that 
at  the  moment  occupied  him.      No  more  brilliant  generalizer 


LN 


Grant   Allen. 


29 


He 


can  ever  have  lived.      Present  him  with  the  most  unexpected 
fact,  or  the  most  complex  set  of  circumstances  (as  it  might 
seem  to  you),  and  he  had  his  theory  in  an  instant,  and  was 
making  it  as  clear,  by  the  aid  of  his  marvellously  copious 
and  exact  vocabulary,  as  though  he  had  drawn  it  on  the  air. 
And  bright  things  by  the  score  all  the  way!     His  gift  of 
stating  the  most  intricate  matter  impromptu  in  a  few  simple 
words,  and  of  pouring  out  the  most  varied  and  profound  learn- 
ing as  though  he  were  telling  a  fairy  tale,  can  hardly  have 
been  equalled,  and  certainly  can  never  have  been  surpassed. 

Well,  we  shall  "  look  it  up  in  Grant  "  no  more.     The  swal- 
lows he  loved  to  see  flying  in  and  out  from  the  eaves  of  his 
beautiful  house  at  Hindhead  will  come  back,  but  he  will  come 
back  no  more.      The  nightjar,  his  favorite  bird,  will  perch 
near  the  windows  at  twilight  with  its  hoarse,  sad,  churring 
C'l'y,  but  Grant  Allen  will  hear  it  no  more.      All  the  goodness, 
the  humor,  the  tenderness,  the  imagination,  the  intellect,  the 
brilliance,  the  love  and  laughter  that  were  Grant  Allen  are 
now  a  little  dust. 

At  his  funeral  I  had  in  my  pocket  his  little  volume  of 
poems,  and,  as  we  turned  away  from  the  sad  place  where  we 
had  left  him,  two  of  his  beautiful  lines  were  murmuring  in  my 
mind: 


Perchance  a  little  light  will  come  with  morning; 
Perchance  I  sHall  but  sleep. 


Perchance ! 


